Vampires Through the Ages Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the grave to tear at the flesh of the living. The film, which was produced on a $114,000 budget, featured a group of survivors holed up in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse fighting off wave after wave of mysteriously reanimated corpses. In the end, all of the main characters died, but the movie went on to gain a life of its own, grossing millions over the years with cinematic re-releases and sequels that continue to this day. Despite the fact that it was initially criticized for its graphic content and terrifying storyline, this low-budget tale of the walking dead opened an entire zombie apocalypse sub-genre that forever changed the way audiences viewed horror films.
    In today’s world, of course, we have the luxury of turning off the television when things get a little scary, but for the small, isolated towns and villages that sprawled across Eastern Europe during the era of the vampire, the fear of corpses wandering about at night knocking on farmhouse doors in search of fresh victims was all too real. These revenants, or reawakened corpses, cast horrifying images in the minds of not only the superstitious peasantry, but also the learned thinkers and writers of the time as well. In the Harleian Miscellany of 1810, John Heinrich Zopfius is said to have commented that “the vampyres, which come out of the graves in the night-time, rush upon people sleeping in their beds, suck out all their blood, and destroy them. They attack men, wo’men, and children, sparing neither age nor sex. The people attacked by them complain of suffocation, and a great interception of spirits; after which, they soon expire. Some of them, being asked, at the point of death, what is the matter with them, say they suffer in the manner just related from people lately dead …” (Malham and Oldys 1808, 233).
    Other serious minds, such as the famous French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire, gave a similar definition of the revenant. In his Philosophical Dictionary , Voltaire wrote that revenants were “… corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into consumption; while the sucking corpse grew fat, got rosy, and enjoyed an excellent appetite” (1856, 371).
    Yet of all the great writers to take a stab at defining the habits and nature of the vampire, it is perhaps John Scoffern who said it best when he said it the simplest: “The best definition I can give of a vampire is a living mischievous and murderous dead body” (1870, 350).
    Naming the Damned
    References in English literature to vampiric revenants, however, appear long before these writers put pen to paper; the first mention of the creatures was in a little-known text on English churches in 1679. Although the term vampire still hadn’t come into print yet, it did begin to surface in popular language sometime after 1688. It wouldn’t emerge on the printed page until almost fifty years later, when it finally materialized in a work entitled Travels of Three Gentlemen from Venice to Hamburg, Being the Grand Tour of Germany in the Year 1734 , by an anonymous author.
    The word vampire is thought to have been borrowed from the German word vampir , which found its genesis in the Eastern Slavic word upir , first written in a 1047 translation of the Book of Psalms. In it, the priest transcribing the work from Glagolitic, the oldest known Slavic alphabet, to the Cyrillic of the First Bulgarian Empire in the ninth century writes his name Upir Likhyi , meaning “Wicked or Foul Vampire.” Although a distasteful moniker such as this seems strange to us today, it is the remnant of an older pagan practice of replacing personal names with nicknames.
    Etymologists tracing the roots of the word have branched into four schools of thought over the years, leading to a great deal of lively debate